Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature, Principally Belletristic .
patriotic, and moral and reflective-usually show by their content whether
they originated in the colonies, and many of them did.
Two literary traditions receive special space outside the chronological­
by-centuries-plus-general-genres order of most of the contents of this chap­
ter, one because it has usually been ignored by those who have written
colonial southern literature and yet it is in fact pervasive from John Smith
to Richard Bland, in both prose and verse. This is the satiric, with its con­
comitants of dialect and humor generally. The other is the southern elegiac
tradition, of which the editor of one recent popular critical anthology
denies the existence and which most other critics have ignored. It begins in
the seventeenth century but is most fully developed in the eighteenth in
forms and imagery and theological background strikingly different from
New England graveyard verse or "Handkerchiefs for Paul."
There is southern belletristic writing, and a great deal of it, like most New
England composition not of high quality. Howard Mumford Jones and
others have called at least the writing of Virginia in the seventeenth century
a secular literature. Relatively speaking, when compared with the digested
or partially digested theology in the expression of the Puritan Saints,
southern writing as a whole is indeed secular. But this is all relative, for the
Christian piety of Captain John Smith shines through his glowing tales of
founding "a nation," and it survives or develops to the threshold of the
Revolution in a Samuel Davies or a James Reid. The alleged deism of Sir
John Randolph and William Stith and their immediate successors, the
writers among the national founding fathers, is no further removed from
orthodox Christianity than the penned discourses of the Reverend Jonathan
Mayhew or lawyer John Adams of Boston.
There is such a quantity of writing which is at least an attempt at beautiful
letters, and so much of artistic quality in the greater number of other
examples of the literary purpose, that most of it can only be summarized
or named here, at times almost in catalogue or bibliographical form. But
here, it is hoped, one may see even more than in preceding chapters that
there is beginning at Jamestown a southern tradition of literature as art
which continues in at least certain of its colonial characteristics to its great
blossoming in the twentieth century. Naturally most of it is mediocre in
style and thrust, but there is much good writing, and some fine writing.
One should reemphasize the suggestion already made that at least up to
the American Revolution there was no cultural lag in belles lettres in the
southern colonies. Through their books and newspapers the planters and
merchants and professional men kept up with Pope or Thomson or the
graveyard poets, with Samuel Johnson's periodicals, with British drama
and fiction. Their blank verse shows the influence of Milton and Thomson,